# Dressing Avatars: Deep Photorealistic Appearance for Physically Simulated Clothing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.15470 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15470/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 108 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Learning Mesh-Based Simulation with Graph Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03409/) (2020)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00452/) (2020)
- [Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06601/) (2018)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [Everybody Dance Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07371/) (2018)
- [ICON: Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09127/) (2021)
- [ARCH: Animatable Reconstruction of Clothed Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04572/) (2020)
- [Deferred Neural Rendering: Image Synthesis using Neural Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12356/) (2019)
- [Multi-Garment Net: Learning to Dress 3D People from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06903/) (2019)
- [A-NeRF: Articulated Neural Radiance Fields for Learning Human Shape, Appearance, and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06199/) (2021)
- [Neural Articulated Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03110/) (2021)
- [DeepHuman: 3D Human Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06473/) (2019)
- [SCANimate: Weakly Supervised Learning of Skinned Clothed Avatar Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03313/) (2021)
- [Tex2Shape: Detailed Full Human Body Geometry From a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08645/) (2019)
- [DeepCap: Monocular Human Performance Capture Using Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08325/) (2020)
- [Neural Human Performer: Learning Generalizable Radiance Fields for Human Performance Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07448/) (2021)
- [H-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Rendering and Temporal Reconstruction of Humans in Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13746/) (2021)
- [SMPLicit: Topology-aware Generative Model for Clothed People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06871/) (2021)
- [TailorNet: Predicting Clothing in 3D as a Function of Human Pose, Shape and Garment Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04583/) (2020)
- [Real-time Deep Dynamic Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01794/) (2021)
- [Structured Local Radiance Fields for Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14478/) (2022)
- [Neural Actor: Neural Free-view Synthesis of Human Actors with Pose Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02019/) (2021)
- [DoubleFusion: Real-time Capture of Human Performances with Inner Body Shapes from a Single Depth Sensor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06023/) (2018)
- [The Power of Points for Modeling Humans in Clothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01137/) (2021)
- [Detailed, accurate, human shape estimation from clothed 3D scan sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04454/) (2017)
- [Learning-Based Animation of Clothing for Virtual Try-On](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07190/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Drivable 3D Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08581/) (2023)
- [PoseVocab: Learning Joint-structured Pose Embeddings for Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13006/) (2023)
- [Towards Garment Sewing Pattern Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04218/) (2023)
- [Robust Dual Gaussian Splatting for Immersive Human-centric Volumetric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08353/) (2024)
- [REC-MV: REconstructing 3D Dynamic Cloth from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14236/) (2023)
- [Garment3DGen: 3D Garment Stylization and Texture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18816/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Garments: Reconstructing Simulation-Ready Clothing with Photorealistic Appearance from Multi-View Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08189/) (2024)
- [Drivable Avatar Clothing: Faithful Full-Body Telepresence with Dynamic Clothing Driven by Sparse RGB-D Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05917/) (2023)
- [LayGA: Layered Gaussian Avatars for Animatable Clothing Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07319/) (2024)
- [Relightable Full-Body Gaussian Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14726/) (2025)
- [EgoAvatar: Egocentric View-Driven and Photorealistic Full-body Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01835/) (2024)
- [MoRF: Mobile Realistic Fullbody Avatars from a Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10275/) (2023)
- [Auto-CARD: Efficient and Robust Codec Avatar Driving for Real-time Mobile Telepresence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11835/) (2023)
- [UMA: Ultra-detailed Human Avatars via Multi-level Surface Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01802/) (2025)
- [Relightable and Dynamic Gaussian Avatar Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09335/) (2025)
- [Dress-Me-Up: A Dataset & Method for Self-Supervised 3D Garment Retargeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03108/) (2024)
- [Garment Animation NeRF with Color Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19774/) (2024)
- [CausalGS: Learning Physical Causality of 3D Dynamic Scenes with Gaussian Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10586/) (2026)
- [EgoRelight: Egocentric Human Capture and Illumination Recovery for Relightable and Photoreal Avatar Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28401/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite recent progress in developing animatable full-body avatars, realistic modeling of clothing - one of the core aspects of human self-expression - remains an open challenge. State-of-the-art physical simulation methods can generate realistically behaving clothing geometry at interactive rates. Modeling photorealistic appearance, however, usually requires physically-based rendering which is too expensive for interactive applications. On the other hand, data-driven deep appearance models are capable of efficiently producing realistic appearance, but struggle at synthesizing geometry of highly dynamic clothing and handling challenging body-clothing configurations. To this end, we introduce pose-driven avatars with explicit modeling of clothing that exhibit both photorealistic appearance learned from real-world data and realistic clothing dynamics. The key idea is to introduce a neural clothing appearance model that operates on top of explicit geometry: at training time we use high-fidelity tracking, whereas at animation time we rely on physically simulated geometry. Our core contribution is a physically-inspired appearance network, capable of generating photorealistic appearance with view-dependent and dynamic shadowing effects even for unseen body-clothing configurations. We conduct a thorough evaluation of our model and demonstrate diverse animation results on several subjects and different types of clothing. Unlike previous work on photorealistic full-body avatars, our approach can produce much richer dynamics and more realistic deformations even for many examples of loose clothing. We also demonstrate that our formulation naturally allows clothing to be used with avatars of different people while staying fully animatable, thus enabling, for the first time, photorealistic avatars with novel clothing.